Believe it or not, my local monster department store here in Madrid had the new Palm Zire 71 and I fondled it for a bit just an hour or so ago while meeting up with Moof who is suprisingly also here in Madrid as well.

Oh. My. GOODNESS! What an AMAZINGLY gorgeous PALM! Have you seen it? In person? I am totally blown away. It's incredible! I've fallen in love with the Palm again! It's just really really well done piece of kit! Great physical design, cool sliding camera, and the SCREEN is incredible! It's got anti-aliasing or something, it was like reading paper, I swear! The pictures were gorgeous, the little joystick worked perfectly, the speed of the device is astounding, scribbling on the drawing pad - even REALLY fast - caused almost no jaggies. I am seriously impressed.

Now this doesn't mean I take back my tenant that Palm and its ilk are doomed. Despite insanely gorgeous devices like this, they are in a death spiral that I've talked about before, and I don't see how they can escape it. But wow. WOW! What a neat Palm! Urgh. It's just soooo sad! My enthusiasm for this device shows how much I really like Palm, but I find it impossible to find some sort of confidence in their OS again. Devices like this make me almost cry to see such great industrial design go to waste.

But still... Even with a kick ass device like this, Palm shows they're not getting it totally. I.e. where's the Bluetooth? Why am I synching over a USB cable again? Why do I have to take out my MMC card to plug in an overly priced Bluetooth card for this functionality? Palm has one of the biggest Bluetooth rollouts in the world... why isn't just "standard" on devices like this? Urgh!!

Okay, let's not think about that for a moment. Let's just bask in the glow of new tech and not worry about market share or viability for a moment shall we? Ahhhh. Gorgeous.